Kate Bush
English singer-songwriter, musician and record producer; sister of John Carder Bush.
I won't open boxes
That I am told not to.
I'm not a Pandora.
I'm much more like
That girl in the mirror.
Between you and me
She don't stand a chance of getting anywhere at all.
Artists shouldn't be made famous. You know... they're just ... as important as... um doctors, and priests ... or maybe not as important sometimes, and yet they have this huge aura of almost god-like quality about them, just because their craft makes a lot of money. And at the same time it is a forced importance — you know, football stars and theatre stars — It is man-made so the press can feed off it.
Take away the love and the anger,
And a little piece of hope holding us together.
Looking for a moment that'll never happen,
Living in the gap between past and future.
Take away the stone and the timber,
And a little piece of rope won't hold it together.
All the banners stop waving
And the flags stop flying
And the silence comes over
Thousands of soldiers...
We take all the telescopes
And we turn them inside out
And we point them away from the big sky.
Put your eye right up to the glas.
Here we'll find the constellation of the heart.
Steer your life by these stars
On the unconditional chance
'Tis here where Hell and Heaven dance.
This is the constellation of the heart.
Your name is being called by sacred things
That are not addressed nor listened to.
Sometimes they blow trumpets.
Out on the wiley, windy moors
We'd roll and fall in green.
You had a temper like my jealousy:
Too hot, too greedy.
How could you leave me,
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you. I loved you, too.
When the conductor Richard Hickox rang me one day in 1984 to ask if I could help with a rather unusual job for which he and his choir had been engaged, I was intrigued. Kate Bush, it transpired, was working on her new album, Hounds of Love, and for one track, Hello Earth, she wanted a chorus to recreate the orthodox singing/chanting that made such a contribution to the film Nosferatu.
Passing through air.
You mix the stars with your arms.
Walking through there.
The doom of eternity balms.
Skies of grey are not today.
Aerial succeeds because it's all there for a reason. And because the good stuff is just so sublime. 'King of the Mountain', Bush's Elvis-inspired single, is both a fine opener and a total red herring. Bush's juices really get going on 'Pi', a sentimental ode to a mathematician, audacious in both subject matter and treatment. The chorus is the number sung to many, many decimal places. It's closely followed by a gushing ode to Bush's son, Bertie, that's stark and medieval-sounding. The rest of disc one (aka A Sea of Honey) sets a very high bar for disc two, with the Joan of Arc-themed 'Joanni' and the downright poppy 'How to Be Invisible' raising the hair on your arms into a Mexican wave.
Disc two, subtitled A Sky of Honey, is a suite of nine tracks which, among other things, charts the passage of light from afternoon ('Prologue') to evening ('An Architect's Dream', 'The Painter's Link') and through the night until dawn. Things get a little hairier here.
I should be crying, but I just can't let it show.
I should be hoping, but I can't stop thinking
Of all the things I should've said,
That I never said.
All the things we should've done,
That we never did.
All the things I should've given,
But I didn't.
I am ice and dust. I am sky.
I can see horses wading through snowdrifts.
My broken hearts, my fabulous dances.
My fleeting song, fleeting.
The world is so loud. Keep falling. I'll find you.
With a kiss
I'd pass the key
And feel your tongue
Teasing and receiving.
With your spit
Still on my lip,
You hit the water.
Oh, Jesus Christ, he wasn't to know,
Like a chicken with a fox,
He couldn't win the war with ego.
Give the kid the pick of pips,
And give him all your stripes and ribbons.
Now he's sitting in his hole,
He might as well have buttons and bows.
See those trees
Bend in the wind
I feel they've got a lot more sense than me
You see I try to resist...
Ooh, James, are you selling your soul to a cold gun?
You're the only one I want...
I don't know why I'm crying.
Am I suspended in Gaffa?
Not until I'm ready for you,
Not until I'm ready for you
Can I have it all.
All of the birds are laughing
Come on let's all join in.
This little girl inside me
Is retreating to her favourite place.
Go into the garden.
Go under the ivy,
Under the leaves,
Away from the party.
Go right to the rose.
Go right to the white rose
(For me.)